Adopting SOA – Experiences from Nine Finnish Organizations

Service-Oriented Architecture is expanding its footprint in an organization’s IT landscape. The era of early adopters is over. However, the path to SOA is long, slow and sometimes even bumpy. Many organizations have taken the first steps, and also bumps, in SOA adoption already many years ago.Adoption has been started for various reasons; typically, motivation is derived from a problem situation where an organization has become aware of the limitations of the legacy compared to visions and plans for the future. In this empirical exploratory study we have explored SOA adoption by conducting indepth theme interviews in nine Finnish organizations.We focus on the SOA adoption process, especially describing and analyzing how the adoption began,what the experiences were, and how the adoption process evolved.